hanging is something I really don’t want to do. Bad Tom is my second cousin and I remember when we were boys playing with each other at my parents’ place on Old Quicksand Road. We spent a lot of time together, and they were the best times ever! I like Tom, and don’t want to hang him, but it’s my duty. That’s what they elected me for.”
After supper early one evening, another prisoner, Ike Montgomery, who was serving a short sentence, passed a note to the jailer. Centers unfolded the piece of paper and read it. It detailed Bad Tom’s escape preparations. Montgomery’s cell was adjacent to Smith’s. He had heard Smith sawing the bars for the last few nights.
The jailer was skeptical. Montgomery was just having some fun, he thought. However, it was his responsibility to make sure. Centers rounded up two deputy sheriffs to accompany him. The jailer knew Smith had killed several men; he didn’t want to be the next.
With the two deputies following, Centers went to Bad Tom’s cell. Smith was seated in a wooden chair. “Smith, I want you to stay in that chair,” the jailer warned.
“If you say so,” Tom said.
“Tom, there’s a rumor going around the jail that you’re planning an escape. Is there anything to that?” the jailer asked.
“No sir,” Bad Tom said. But Centers noticed that Smith, usually cool, seemed quite nervous. Something was wrong, the jailer knew.
“Boys, take this prisoner to the empty cell, the one with no windows,” Centers said. The deputies then marched Bad Tom out of the cell and down the hallway to the windowless corner cell.
Centers ordered a search of Bad Tom’s former cell. At first the inspection turned up nothing. After a few minutes, however, the jailer spotted the cardboard tube in the window. He opened it and found the small hacksaw and blades. A further examination revealed that two bars on the window were nearly sawed in half. He also spotted the soap and dirt mixture Smith had used to hide his handiwork. Centers decided to keep Smith in the windowless cell until the date with the hangman. Sheriff Combs concurred.
The following day, Tom’s older brother, Bill, came to see him. He was thoroughly searched before being allowed to enter Tom’s cell. “I heard about the jailer finding the saw and the cut bars, Tom. How did he find out?”
“I’m not sure. I think that bastard that was in the cell next to mine told him,” Bad Tom said. “He must have heard me sawing. That man had better be glad I’m still in here. If I could, I’d kill the son of a bitch.”
“What about Millie, Tom? Do they know she brought you the saw and blades?”
“They might suspect it was her but they can’t prove it. Since I didn’t escape, they won’t do nothin’. Tell Millie I really appreciate what she did.”
“Okay, Tom, I’ll tell her.”
“Bill, I don’t know what I’m gonna do! I’ve been thinking about myself and I don’t think I would have done all the things that I’ve done if it hadn’t been for them damn fits. As you may remember, those fits started when I had just turned fourteen back on Carr’s Fork.”
Chapter 2
Young Tom
The warmth from the kitchen fireplace felt good this dreary, rainy, cool—almost cold—1873 day in the tiny Perry County community of Carr’s Fork. The community would be located in Knott County after 1885. Mary Polly was partial to Tom. Something about him seemed different from the other children. She did not assign Tom as many chores as his four brothers and two sisters. The eldest boy in the family, Isaac, was ten years older than Tom. He became more like a father than a brother to Tom, Sam, Alexander, Bill and their sisters, Millie and Dulciney. However, Isaac lacked the authority their father had exercised, and thus he was not an effective disciplinarian. Mary Polly had always depended on her husband to discipline the children. She quickly discovered that—like Isaac—she lacked the skills to command respect for authority.
A typical farm day began at dawn. Although Tom strayed from the work ethic and eventually became an outlaw, the Smith children were known as hard workers. Mary Polly made sure that the boys—Isaac, Sam, Bill, Tom, and Alexander, headed out to the fields for an hour or two of work while she and her daughters, Millie and Dulciney, fetched fresh hen eggs and several forty pound pails of water, then “set” the bread (mixing the dough and letting it rise). Next, Mary Polly started breakfast. Depending on the season, she fixed sausage, bacon, or salt pork with gravy. Side dishes included fried eggs and fried Irish or sweet potatoes. Salt was the only commercial product cooks used regularly. Sugar was a luxury; mountain women made do with wild honey or sorghum molasses.
After breakfast, all seven children went into the fields. Mary Polly then began to prepare the noon meal—called “dinner”—the main meal of the day. “Supper”—the evening meal—usually consisted of cold leftovers. Sweet milk and buttermilk with leftover cornbread, eaten out of a glass or cup, might be a before-bedtime snack.
For the mountain people, a cheap source of meat was hogs. They would go out and root around in the woods for food. Therefore, the Smith family didn’t have to feed pigs much. A few cattle were kept. There was always a milk cow or two. Families and neighbors would take turns having a beef slaughtered, and divide the meat among themselves before it spoiled. Also, the families preserved meat for winter by salting or smoking. Wild game like deer, rabbits and squirrels, freshly caught fish, and dry land fish (morel mushrooms) were important supplements in those days as well. The chickens provided eggs, meat, and feathers for pillows and featherbeds (homemade mattress covers stuffed with feathers).
As for vegetables, there was no canning. Some vegetables like cabbage and green beans were pickled in stoneware crocks. Fruits and green beans were often dried for the wintertime. In mid-July at berry picking time, Bill Smith would pick as much as thirteen and a half quarts of blackberries by himself in a day. Tom could pick a respectable amount, but only if he chose. Always trying to pick a few more berries than his sister, Millie, Tom believed it didn’t look good for a girl to out-pick him.
Tom discovered early on that he liked to kill things. One day while out picking blackberries, Tom killed a five foot rattlesnake with sixteen rattles on its tail.
Tom was named after Thomas Kelly, his mother’s brother. Kelly was an “Old Regular” Baptist minister. He taught all the Smith boys how to handle a gun. Kelly noticed that Tom had a special talent with firearms. He told Mary Polly, “You know Tom favors the Kelly side of the family.”
Kelly started taking Tom out in the woods when he was only eight years old, showing him how to use both a pistol and a rifle. The first time he fired a weapon, the boy could hardly stand up to the jolt. But after Tom grew accustomed to it, he could fire both weapons steadily. By ten, little Tom could hit a target fifty feet away with ease. In his early teens, he continued to shoot in the forest by himself, becoming one of the best marksmen in the area. Tom often supplied the family with rabbit, squirrel, and other small game killed in the woods.
During his excursions into the woods, Tom often carried a small tablet and wrote song lyrics. Then, he figured out tunes. One of his acquaintances taught him how to play the banjo. In the forest, the boy sang his own songs and accompanied himself. After singing a concert, Tom sometimes took a bow and then shook hands with the tree branches.
African-American musicians introduced the first banjos to North America as early as the seventeenth century. They made them from gourds, with a stick neck and strings. Tom Smith’s banjo was the traditional type we would recognize today. After numerous solo concerts in the woods, Tom finally began singing some of his songs at home. Word spread in the hollows that Tom was a good singer, and he began to be asked to sing before groups at social gatherings and occasionally at church services. At the age of fourteen, an incident occurred that forever changed his life. One afternoon, Mary Polly took a big iron pot of bubbling milk gravy off the kitchen fire and began pouring it into a bowl on the round oak table top. Then, suddenly, Tom fell at her feet. He gagged, then yelled. His entire body shook and his head banged the floor.
“You nearly made me spill this